What is Photo Stitch?

Lesson I

One-Color Photo Stitch Designs

An appreciable part
of our designs are in the photo stitch
technique, and our customers often ask us about it. We prepared several
lessons and invite you to browse through them.

The photo-stitch technique is more
reminiscent of pencil or crayon
sketches, rather than embroidery. Multi-colored photo-stitch designs
give
an almost Impressionist effect, which is why this technique is often
used
when digitizing works of art. It uses very densely placed stitches,
often
overlaping each other. In this lesson we're going to try one- to
three-color
designs.

Step Three: Photo stitch
is usually dense. That is why it's
very important to choose the fabric and stabilizer correctly. For our
lesson
we've chosen linen-like synthetic fabric, it's medium-weight,
evenly-woven
fabric, and medium-weight iron-on tear-away stabilizer.
Iron the stabilizer onto the fabric.

Step Four: Hoop the
fabric with the stabilizer, stretching them
across the hoop tightly. There should not be any folds or areas where
the
fabric has puckered.

Step Five: We used
#75/11 needles, 40-weight rayon threads for
the needle and the 60-weight thread for the bobbin. For heavier fabrics
it's recommended to use # 80/12 - #90/14 needles.
Choose the thread for your work, according to the style that you want
for the end result. It might be black, to immitate a charcoal sketch,
or
any hue of brown to immitate sepia, or blue to immitate ink, or any
other
color that you like.

Step Six: Embroider the
design. You should get the following
result: The first photo below shows the design with the jump stitches
and
the second one shows the design after the jump stitches were removed.

We have a variety of one color designs on
our site, such as Notes
and Instruments Sets, Chinese
Dragons, and others. All these designs are simple
and perfect
for a beginner. More experienced embroiderers also like these one-color
designs because they give a lot of creative possibilities. You can see
works of some of our customers in Works
of Our Customers Gallery.

For Homework, we offer you to embroider a
portrait of Pope John Paul
II, which has 3 colors. The colors that we suggest in the color card
are
black, gray and white, which gives the effect of a black and white
photo.
If you like to experiment, you can try dark brown, light brown and
beige
instead. We recommend to use white or cream fabric.

After embroidering the design, you should
get a result similar to the
one below or better.

Most 3-color portraits in our
gallery offamous
people are done in the same way. Please also check out the Works
of our Customers section, where you will find interesting
ideas and
photos which our customers have kindly sent us.

To help us to improve this tutorial please
don't hesitate to ask questions.